In The Balance
In The Balance: 1942 Tosev 3 vanished, to be replaced by a typical inhabitant: a biped with a red-brown skin, rather taller than a typical male of the Race. The biped wore a strip of cloth around its midsection and carried a bow and several stone-tipped arrows. Black fur sprouted from the top of its head. The biped vanished. Another took its place, this one swaddled from head to foot in robes of dirty grayish tan. A curved iron sword hung from a leather belt at its waist. Beside it stood a brown-furred riding animal with a long neck and a hump on its back. Bomb craters pocked the fields. Here and there, men and women lay beside them, torn and twisted in death. Then suddenly, Teerts needed no head-up display to gauge what was happening: gouts of fire suddenly filled the darkness below as aircraft tumbled out of the sky. When his vision cleared, the Tosevite aircraft, one wing sheared away, was already spinning out of control towards the ground. He'd never been among so many aircraft in his life. He bled off still more speed, to avoid collision. Another target, another burst, another kill. A few moments later, another, and another. He fired a burst. Flames sprang from the Tosevite killercraft. At the same moment, it shot back at him. The shells fell short. The native, all afire now, plunged out of the sky. Teerts raked the stampeding herd of aircraft twice more before his ammunition ran low. Rolvar and Gefron had also done all the damage they could. One second, the Lancaster below and to the right of George Bagnall's was flying along serenely as you please. The next, it exploded in midair. For a moment, Bagnall saw men and pieces of machine hang suspended as if on strings from heaven. Then they were gone. Another Lanc blew up, not far away. As if to italicize his words, two more bombers went up in flames. The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine, past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could. A noise like the end of the world -- the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank's ammunition began going off. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first. Jager was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open, men started bailing out. One, two, three... commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance. Dust fountained around two more panzers. Both of them stopped dead. Smoke poured from them. Along with the reek of flaming gas and oil and cordite, Jager's nose caught the roast-pork stink of burning human flesh. As these dragonfly planes hung in the sky, they fired machine guns and rockets into Liu Han's poor bleeding village. Screams pierced the rattle of gunfire and the crash of explosions. So did the deep, harsh cries of the Japanese soldiers. Then a machine gun began to chatter inside the ruins of the yamen. The Japanese were doing their best to fight back. Tracer bullets drew fiery lines up towards the dragonfly planes. Two rockets snarled groundward. A roar, a flash of light, and the machine gun fell silent. Had she been attacked by such monsters, Liu Han knew she would have either given up at once or fled. The Japanese did neither. They fought on until they were all killed. It did not take long. One of those devils lay on the grass just outside the houses. The blood that splashed its scaly hide was red as a man's. After three or four steps, he came to the body of the colored steward. The fellow had a hole in the back of his white mess jacket big enough to throw a cat through. Pieces of him poked through the hole. Fiore's stomach did a flip-flop. He was glad he'd only thought about it when the things -- he still didn't know what else to call them -- shot the fleeing man in the back. Two landcruisers in the formation fired missiles after it. However fast it was, they were faster. It tumbled to the ground; dust flew from the brown track it plowed through the green. Brave, Ussmak thought, brave but stupid. The Tosevites seemed like that. A heartbeat later, he did see the turret leap off a Tosevite landcruiser. Another Tosevite was killed, this one in a pyrotechnic display of exploding ammunition. He must have been too stunned to listen to the whole command sequence, for the big gun fired then. He had the satisfaction of watching the landcruiser that had almost killed him start to burn. A funny noise in his audio button, sort of a wet splat. Then a cry of disbelief and rage from Telerep: "Votal! Vo--- They've killed the commander!" The Big Ugly fired again, uselessly, then turned and tried to run. Telerep cut him down with machine-gun fire. Ussmak ran over the carcass, smashing it into the grass and dirt. His jaws opened wide. Votal was avaenged. The cannon roared. Through his field glasses, Jager saw a hole appear in the troop carrier's flank. "Hit!" he shrieked. The carrier slewed sideways, stopped. It was burning. A hatch came down in the rear. Lizards started bailing out. German foot soldiers opened up on them, picking them off as they emerged. Ernst Riecke was a split second too slow. Jager watched in dismay as the turret flew off his panzer and crushed an infantryman who was scrambling to get out of the way. The shell pierced it. The tank stopped. They'll have to take the driver out of there with a spoon, Jager thought. Two Lizards popped out of the turret, one after the other. The hull machine gun from Jager's tank cut them down. Tannenwald's tank had done almost as well as the company commander's. Its first shot knocked the track off a Lizard panzer's road wheels. The hit tank swerved, out of control. A foot soldier ran up to it, tossed a potato-masher grenade into the open cupola. Its small blast was followed an instant later by a big one as the panzer's ammunition went off. His trusty panzer, which had served so well for so long, died under him. Smoke poured up through the engine vents of the rear deck. His crew began bailing out with him. A bullet struck home with a noise like a slap on a wet, bare back. Somebody shrieked. "Have you seen Fuchs?" Schultz's grin slipped. "He didn't make it out." "That was the shriek then," Jager said. Ahead of them, streaks of fire began leaping up from the ground. Fully laden bombers exploded in midair, one after another, blazing through the night like great orange chrysanthemums of flame. They would have been even more beautiful had each one not meant the deaths of so many men. When the ship blew, it blew sky-high. No one ever found a trace of Breltan -- or his seat. --- The fireball was big enough to be visible across sixty kilometers. The 56th Emperor Jossano went up in the same sort of blast as had taken the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. The first bomb blast, a few meters behind him, hurled him facefirst into that great mountain of metal. He felt things break -- his nose, a cheekbone, several ribs, a hip. He opened his mouth to scream. Another bomb went off, this one even closer. Laughing still, he plunged into her, leaving behind for a little while the terror outside the blacked-out apartment. "Berlin, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel answered. "It shall be done." (nuke) The French papers, still German-dominated, had screamed of nothing else the past few days, shrieked about the fireball that consumed the city, wailed over unbelievable devastation, wept at the hundreds of thousands reported dead. Yi Min turned to her and kissed her. She did not respond, but he hardly noticed; his tongue pushed its way into her mouth. She tried to fend him off. His greater weight overbore her, pressed her down to the mat. Already he was tugging at her tunic. She sighed and submitted, staring up at the gray fabric of the tent ceiling and hoping he would finish soon. He thought he was a good lover. He did everything a good lover should, caressing her, putting his face between her legs. "Let us try the hovering butterflies today," he said, by which he meant that he wanted her on top. She sighed again. He would not even give her the chance just to lie there limply. Looking in every direction but at his flushed, rather greasy face, she straddled him, lowered herself. He filled her, but that was all she felt; none of the delight she had known from her husband. She moved vigorously just the same -- that was the way to make it over soonest. He did not have an easy time of it. She had to help him with her hand and then her mouth before he would rise at all. He moved slowly and carefully within her, shepherding his strength, and went on almost endlessly before at least he managed to spend. Maybe that long, slow passage was what helped Liu Han startle herself by also ascending to the Clouds and Rain. The last time anybody'd thrown a stone at a Lizard, five people were shot immediately afterward. That stopped that. The strapped-on mine exploded even as the animal was crushed to red pulp. He heard one of the Tosevite bullets strike home with a dull, horribly final-sounding smack. He couldn't look back; he was scrambling through the front hull hatch, almost falling down on top of the other landcruiser's driver. That male swore. "One of your crewmales just got hit. He won't get up, either." "Was it---?" But it wasn't, Ussmak knew, for there was Krentel, nattering away over nothing in particular up in the turret. Telerep, the driver thought with a surge of pain. They'd been together all through training, they'd awakened from cold sleep side by side, within moments of each other; with Votal they'd fought their landcruiser across this seemingly endless plain. Now Votal was dead, and the landcruiser, and Telerep. And there was Krentel, nattering. The rockets burst all around him, lances of fire that lashed the American position. The heavy machine gun fell silent. Their guns tore at the new autogiro. This time they did the job right. The aircraft slammed to the sound sideways and became a fireball. Smoke rose into the blue sky. As if to underscore the advice, someone who hadn't stayed low enough suddenly pitched forward onto his face. The Warhawks came back to strafe the Lizards on the ground. Something rose on a pillar of fire from behind a boulder in the middle of a Main Street lawn that marked a spot where Lincoln had spoken. The P-40 fled, twisting with all the skill the pilot had. It was not enough. The rocket tumbled it from the sky. A Lizard plane shot past, heading east. Yeager cringed, but the pilot wasted no time on a target as trivial as infantry. No doubt he wanted that battery of field guns. The shells kept coming for another minute, maybe two, then abruptly stopped. The Lizard was down and thrashing and horribly wounded from the grenade; its red, red blood stained the gravel of the alley. Yeager's stomach did a slow, lazy loop. He'd never expected the agony of a creature from another world to reach him, but it did. The Lizard yammered something in its own incomprehensible language. Yeager had no idea whether it was defiance or a plea for mercy. All he wanted to do was put the alien out of its misery and make it be quiet. He raised his rifle, shot it through the head. It twitched once or twice, then lay still. The Lizards emerged from their hiding places. There were only five more of them, Yeager saw, and two of them were wounded, leaning on their fellows. More ruins, though, were fresh, sharp-edged. The Germans had fought like men possessed to hold the Lizards out of Warsaw. Russie walked by the burnt shell of a Nazi panzer. It still exhaled the dead-meat stench of man's final corruption. This was --- the fifth? The sixth? She couldn't remember. Maybe, after a while, it ceased to matter. How could her defilement grow any greaeter? "You---name--is?" He pointed to his furry chest. "Bobby Fiore." As far as skill went, Yi Min was three times the lover the foreign devil with the unpronounceable second name proved to be. But if he was rather clumsy, he treated her as if it were their wedding night, not as if she was a handy convenience. His lips came down on hers; his hand roamed her body. A bit sooner than she would have liked, his fingers found their way between her legs. They didn't go quite to the right place. After a few seconds of frustration, she reached down and moved them to where they belonged. She was at the edge of the Clouds and Rain when he took his hand away. Her eyes opened. It was her turn to start to frown. But his weight pressed her against the slick surface of the mat. His tongue teased her left nipple as he guided himself into her. Her legs rose, clenched around him. With her inner muscles, she squeezed him as hard as she could. Up ahead, two or three tanks were burning. As he watched, smoke and flame burst from under another one. A tread thrown, it ground itself into the mud. A flat bang! and a shriek off to his right told him that his caution wasn't wasted. (shell-borne Lizard antitank mines) Farther up ahead, another tank rolled over a mine. This one, a Sherman, started to burn. "The government of the Reich is grieved to report that Washington, D.c., capital of the United States of America, appears to have been the victim of a bomb of the type which recently made a martyr of Berlin." "A Mosquito just took out one of their planes. Bounced him from above, almost head-on --- couldn't very well come up on him from behind, could he, what with the Lizards' being the faster aircraft. Says he saw the enemy break up in midair and then he was diving for the deck for all he was worth." "Another hit!" he said. From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. The muzzle of the cannon lowered a centimeter or so, fired again. This time, the machine gun was put out of action -- a singularly bloodless term, Jager thought, for having a couple of men suddenly made into mangled chunks of raw meat. When he got up to it, he found out why it hadn't moved since: one of the rounds that shattered the windshield had also blown out the back of the driver's head. The blood and brains splashed all over the inside of the cab looked no different from those of a human being similarly killed. Like a sinking ship, the helicopter heeled over onto one side and crashed. One of the helicopters blew up in midair, showering flaming debris over the woods. "Chernobyl, I think," Max said. (the town where the two Lizard ships loaded with plutonium went down) "I had a woman whose skin was black as charcoal all over, save only the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. And I had another who was as pale as milk, even her nipples only pink, with eyes of fine jade and hair and bush the color of a fox's fur." "Ahh," the men said again, imagining it. Mutt swung the rifle up to his shoulder, exhaled, saw the front of the Lizard's head explode in a red mist a split second before he threw himself away from his firing position. He glanced over to where Sergeant Schneider had been hiding. Any further jokes stuck in his throat. The veteran was nothing but splashed blood and raw meat ground not too fine. A couple of them weren't going anywhere: they lay dead as gruesomely as Schneider. Three or four others, as lucky as he'd been himself, were getting away from the fire as fast as they could. And a couple of wounded men flopped on the floor like flesh-landed fish in the bottom of a boat. The tiny truce held for perhaps half a minute. Mutt rolled the second injured soldier off his shoulder, discovered he wasn't breathing. He grabbed the fellow's wrist; his finger found the spot just on the thumb side of the tendons. No pulse. The soldier's arm flopped limply when he let it fall. "Aah, shit," he said dully. The strange moment of comradeship had gone for nothing, lost in the waste that was war. The airplane's engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora, Illinois had any windows left to break. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. "No good in a fight, am I?" The soldier beside him looked innocent. "Did I say something?" The kid got up on one knee to fire, then went over backwards with almost the grace of a circus acrobat. Something hot and wet splashed Daniels. The flickering firelight showed red-streaked gray on the back of his hand. He violently wiped it against his trouser leg. "Brains," he said, shuddering. When he glanced over at the tommy-gunner, the top of the youngster's head was clipped off, as if by a hatchet. A spreading pool of blood reached towards him. One of the planes zoomed along the length of the pier, turned loose a couple of bombs. The AA fire cut off as sharply as a chicken's squawks when the cleaver comes down. Cannon shells raked the Caledonia from starboard to port. Glass shattered. Metal screamed. A moment later, so did men. The Lizard pilot, happy with the strafing run, darted westward towards his base. Something hot and wet splashed Yeager. When he touched it, his hand came away smeared with red. He looked up. There on the deck, a little in front of him, lay Virgil's still-twitching legs. A few feet away were the soldier's head and shoulders and arms. Nothing but that red smear was left of the parts in between. His hand dove under her shirt. He stroked her smooth thigh above the top of her stocking, then yanked at the crotch of her panties. At the same time, she pulled his pants down just far enough. She was so wet, he went deep into her the moment she impaled herself on him. He'd never known such heat. He exploded almost at once, and in the first instant of returning self-consciousness feared he'd been too quick to satisfy her. But her spine was arched, her head thrown back; she made little mewling noises deep in her throat as she quivered above him. "Colonel?" The colored fellow spat in the dirt of the trench. "You know damn well I'm not a colonel. Why don't you just call me by my name? I'm Charlie Sanders, and you could have found it out by askin'." Yi Min was still trying to figure out what the word meant when Drefsab reached inside his protective clothing and pulled out a gun. It spat fire, again and again and again. Inside Yi Min's hut, the shots rang incredibly loud. As the bullets clubbed him to the carpet, he heard through the reports the girl in the bedroom starting to scream. At first Yi Min felt only the impacts, not the pain. Then it struck him. The world turned black, shot through with scarlet flames. He tried to scream himself, but managed only a bubbling moan through the blood that flooded into his mouth. The cold reached his heart. The scarlet flames faded, leaving only black. In the open fields in front of a grim little town called Cissna Park, Illinois stood a Lizard tank. It was defiantly out in the open, with a view that reached for miles. In front of it, burning or by now burnt out, lay the hulks of at least half a dozen Lees and Shermans. Some had been killed at close to three miles. They didn't have a prayer of touching the Lizard tank at that range, let alone killing it. The tank gunner squeezed off an answering burst, longer this time. Another silence fell after he stopped. The fellow with the Browning automatic rifle did not reply now. Wounded or dead, Larssen thought grimly. The tank turret turned on to the other BAR man. He had a better spot from which to shoot back, and lasted quite a bit longer than the first gunner had. The firefight between him and the tank gunner went on through several exchanges. More fire, some blue, some orange, spurted from the stricken vehicle. Hatches popped open in the turret; three Lizards bailed out. Now, yelling like a savage, Jens fired with ferocious glee. Suddenly the tables were turned, the tormentors were all but helpless against those they had bedeviled. One Lizard fell, then another. The last Lizard who'd made it out of the hatch went down under a fusillade of bullets. One of the BAR men was gruesomely dead, the top of his skull clipped off by a Lizard round and gray-red brains splashed in the snow. The other had a belly wound. He was unconscious but breathing. The major pulled aside clothes, dusted the bleeding wound with sulfa powder, slapped on a field dressing, and waved for a medic. He turned the nose of his killercraft towards the nearest Big Ugly, fired a short burst. Smoke poured from the enemy's engine; the plane began to fall. As if to underscore his concern, half a mile ahead a helicopter skimmed low over the ground like a mechanized shark. A rocket lanced out to obliterate an American half-track and however many men it was carrying. The helicopter's rotor clipped a tree. The machine did a twisting somersault straight into the ground. The penitentiary outside Pontiac was a bombed-out ruin now. The wreckage of an American fighter plane lay just outside the prison gates, the upright tail the only piece intact. It was also probably the only cross the pilot who'd been inside would ever get. (170,000 human casualties by end of the first book by my reckoning. Mainly from the pair of nuclear blasts on Berlin and Washington. 50,000 Lizard casualties. I wonder who's winning.....)